National Souls as Archangelic Forces and Spiritual Destiny

GA 174a — 3 December 1914, Stuttgart

Second Lecture

A lecture such as was given the day before yesterday could easily give the impression that a people's soul should only be spoken for out of mere sympathy. If the spiritual researcher were to speak about these matters today purely out of sympathy, out of mere passion, then one could be certain that what he has to say has no particular value in terms of spiritual research, or that what he has to say, because it is imbued with passion, must be fundamentally untrue. Now, to what extent what was said the day before yesterday may, despite all this, be spoken as coherent with the deepest insights of spiritual science of the present day, that should emerge for you from the way in which the spiritual researcher must relate to one or the other folk soul.

We already know from the very elementary presentation in anthroposophy that when we speak of folk souls, we do not mean what the outer, exoteric world understands by an abstract term. We may say that quite definite entities, with archangelic rank — one has only to read about it in the lecture cycle on 'The Mission of Individual National Souls' — entities with a consciousness that is higher than human consciousness, guide the affairs of nations. And we look up to these folk souls, so we speak of them as real, actual entities, indeed more real entities than we human beings ourselves are. How does the human being enter into a relationship with these folk souls in relation to his spiritual soul? We will first raise this question.

We know that man alternates between waking and sleeping in relation to his consciousness; we know that man has to be awake within his physical and etheric bodies and that he then, between falling asleep and waking up, dwells in his astral body and in his I. If a person is outside of their physical body with their astral body and I between falling asleep and waking up, then they are in a region that is completely different in relation to the folk soul, to which they primarily belong in a particular incarnation, than the region in which the person is in relation to the folk soul when they are in their physical body. Through his language and many other things, man is born into the realm of his folk soul. How does this folk soul affect the human soul, that which is taken out of the physical and etheric bodies during sleep, but which is present in the body during waking? How does the folk soul of the people to which a person belongs affect the individual soul of the person?

It actually only has an effect during the time in which the human being is immersed in the physical body, from the moment of waking until the moment of falling asleep. The human being is immersed in the forces of the physical and etheric bodies, and what I would like to call the tentacles of the folk soul, the soul of the people to which the human being belongs in a particular incarnation, is also immersed in these forces. And we not only submerge in our physical body, we also submerge in a certain part of our folk soul, we live from waking up to falling asleep while we are in our physical body, with what is going on in the physical body, within the folk soul. We experience what we experience in communion with the folk soul during our waking hours, only that the folk soul does not speak directly into what is fully conscious in the I, that it speaks more into the subconscious of the astral body from the etheric body, that it tinges, nuances, gives our feeling and temperament a certain direction. This is the essential way in which we relate to it. The one who, through his corresponding initiation, is able to observe all that is involved when a person submerges into the physical body, he sees, looks at the encounter with the folk soul when submerging into the physical body. But he also sees something else. And when I speak of this, you will soon recognize that objectivity must prevail within what the spiritual researcher has to say about one or other folk soul.

The spiritual researcher lives in those moments when he is strengthened and illuminated in the right way by the spiritual and soul life and enables it to live consciously and independently of the body. He lives in such a way that he can observe where the human being is, even when he is outside of his physical body with his soul and spirit, with his astral body and I. The spiritual researcher observes how every human soul, unconsciously, between falling asleep and waking up, immerses itself in the entire environment of the folk souls that are relevant for a particular time. While the human being is immersed in the physical body, he is with the national soul of his nation. In the state of sleep, he is with all the other national souls of the time in question, with the exception of the one with which he is in the physical body during the waking state.

The spiritual researcher has ample opportunity to become acquainted with the characteristics of the other national souls, because as soon as he becomes aware of himself in his disembodied state, he lives spiritually and soulfully with the other national souls in the same way that he lives with his own national soul in the physical body. In this state it would be quite impossible to allow one's ordinary passions to lead one to speak in a one-sided way about the one folk soul. But when the spiritual researcher consciously lives with these other folk souls, this consciousness also shows him that every person unconsciously connects with the other folk souls between falling asleep and waking up, but somewhat differently than with his own folk soul. When you enter your physical body, you get to know the individual folk soul with its essential characteristics, essentially its activity in its effect on you, albeit in the subconscious. During sleep or in the state of initiation, one gets to know the other folk-souls, not as individuals, but in their interaction; only one's own folk-soul is not present. The others interact as in a round dance, and in that which their round dance activity is, one lives in it, as one lives with one's own folk-soul in the physical body during the day. Thus one lives

5 not with the peculiarity of the one national soul, but with the interaction. There is only one thing by which one can be condemned, quite certainly condemned, to be torn out of the normal togetherness with the dance of the national souls and to be together with only one foreign national soul in the body-free state, that is, in sleep. Do understand me: it is not normal to be with a foreign folk soul; but you can achieve it if you passionately hate this other folk soul. In this way you condemn yourself to be torn out of the dance of the other folk souls and to be together with this one folk soul in a sleeping state, as you are with your own folk soul during the waking state.

Yes, these are objective truths that spiritual research reveals. It shows you that it is bitterly serious about the sentence that is often spoken by spiritual science: that what confronts us in external reality, maya, is great deception, and that behind this aja, behind this veil, there are truths which he who is content with the veil of Maya cannot comprehend with his intellect and does not want to comprehend with his will. There are still many people in our time who cannot yet see what lies behind the veil of Maya, and therefore cannot understand that there is such a supersensible, invisible world and that in it the relationship of the human soul to the other folk-souls is quite different from anything one could dream of. If one takes spiritual science seriously precisely where it points to the spheres that are connected with our life, then one must bear that spiritual science points to conditions in the spiritual world that are so uncomfortable to immerse oneself in, even just with one's consciousness, that one resists it with one's will. One does not want to submerge, one would like the truth to be different with regard to very many things. That not only the intellect but also the will resists what spiritual science often has to say as something bitterly serious, that is something we may also bring before our soul one day. And from feelings that can be stimulated by such a discussion as the one just expressed, we feel that the principle we have within our spiritual movement, of a certain work, without distinction of race, color, nationality and so on, is so closely connected with the deeper essence of our spiritual-scientific movement that it is actually nonsense for anyone who truly understands the profound seriousness of spiritual-scientific truths not to support this first principle. It is indeed nonsense, for to hate the nature of some folk soul in the deepest human being means to condemn oneself to be in the subconscious with this folk soul during sleep in exactly the same way as one is in one's subconscious during waking with the folk soul that is one's own. For the normal interaction with national souls during sleep is this: to be together with the whole range of others for an age. That man must not become one-sided, the wise arrangement of the world takes care of that.

We have often emphasized that what a person has to go through in the next few years, the time between death and a new birth, depends to a certain extent on the after-effects of the life in the body between birth and death. Now, as we can see from what has just been discussed, being with the soul of a nation is part of this life in the body. This coexistence with the folk soul, I said, tinges us, nuances us; we take what the folk soul arouses as an impulse in our soul and spiritual being with us into the spiritual world when we pass through the gate of death, and we have to gradually shed it as such. If we bear this in mind, it will be readily understandable to us that it depends on the way in which the human being lives with his national soul, how he still stands in the aftermath of this national soul immediately after death.

Let us consider two European nations in terms of what has just been suggested: the Russian and the French people. The life of the folk soul is such that the folk soul must be active in a different way with its consciousness than a human being is with his consciousness. How is a human being active with his consciousness? He directs his gaze outwards to the horizon of external facts and can also turn his gaze back to his own soul. We know that human beings differ from one another in certain respects. Goethe, for example, belongs to the one group, with his objective view of things; Schiller, on the other hand, belongs to the other group, and is more concerned with his own inner life, and accomplishes what he has to create more from there. The souls of nations are also like this, but only approximately, because their consciousness is of a completely different nature than human consciousness. The national souls stand in a different relation to the individual members of the nation. When they direct their gaze outwards, it is more a glance of the will, sending impulses into the individual members of the nation. In this way they work objectively outwards, directing themselves towards the individual members of the nation. Or they can live more within themselves. The French national soul, in particular, belongs to the national souls that live more inwardly, one might say, and do not worship a national soul realism that spreads over the individuals, but a national soul idealism that lives more within itself. This French national soul, as it permeates the French people today, has a certain stability of consciousness in that it looks back to an earlier time.

I have often pointed out that we have our ordinary physical waking consciousness by immersing ourselves in our spatial body. After death, we have our consciousness by looking back in time at our earlier life. There we can already sense the characteristic of a higher consciousness, which unfolds not in space but in time. It kindles its self by looking back to ancient Greece, for it is essentially a kind of repetition, a reawakening of ancient Greekness. This ancient Greek element lives again in the French national soul, just as the Egyptian-Chaldean element of the third post-Atlantic cultural period lives again in the Italian national soul. Therefore, the Italian national soul has more opportunity to stimulate the sentient soul in the individual human beings who belong to the nation. The actual nature of the French national soul stimulates the intellectual or the emotional soul of the individual. This can be demonstrated quite clearly in detail. Indeed, even the individual historical facts can be explained in a wonderful way if one consults these general results of spiritual research.

Let us just point out a few things in this direction. Consider: what was the peculiarity of the Egyptian folk soul? At that time, there was still astrology that had a direct effect on the soul. The folk soul looked out at the movements of the heavenly bodies, did not see, as today's people do, only material processes in what happened in the cosmos, but really perceived the active spiritual beings behind what was going on outside. Their relationship to the whole cosmos was the same as that of a person to another person, in that they know that a soul looks at them through the whole physiognomy. Thus, everything was a physiognomy to the ancient Egyptians, and they perceived the soul in nature. The meaning of the further development in the new time lies in the fact that what used to be, as it were, an elementary ability, was directly ignited in the physical body of the human being, that it became his inwardness in the newer time, in our fifth post-Atlantic age. And just as what the Egyptian went through was more elemental, so the Italian, in what he repeats, in what he goes through in his sentient soul, goes through it more inwardly, in that he experiences in the sentient soul that which is spiritual and cosmic, but now more interiorized. What could be more internalized than the Egyptian astrology in Dante's Divine Comedy? The true resurrection of ancient Egyptian astrology, but internalized!

And in the same way we could prove that ancient Greek life is to be found, not in the consciousness of the individual Frenchman, but in the working of the impulses of the folk soul. This can be traced right down to the latest invention and into the details; it is just that such research is not taken seriously enough. Greece and, as the other peoples called it, “the barbarians,” even that is reviving. Thus one could prove that in all French literature and art — I do not mean consciously, but in the deeper impulses — ancient Greek life is revived in the way it must be revived in our time. We are therefore dealing with a national soul that has absorbed everything that was in Greek culture, a national soul that therefore has an extraordinarily strong effect on individual human beings, permeating and taking hold of them. The consequence of this is that when the individual French soul enters the physical and etheric body, it enters into the weaving and essence of the sharply defined activity of the national soul. He finds the impulses of this national soul sharply defined. That is why the Frenchman, by absorbing in his physical body this sharp, concise life and weaving of the national soul, lives more in it than in his elementary sense of self, that he lives more in the image, in the idea he forms of the Frenchman, which surges up from the national soul. He lives from the image of the Frenchman. And everything that is of great importance to him is connected with this image: 'Gloire' and so on. The Frenchman lives in his own image, which comes up from the etheric body. This fantasy image is strongly influenced and interwoven with the spiritual and soul nature of the individual, and the person takes it with them as an image that is strongly moved in the etheric body when they enter the spiritual world after death. It is very difficult for them to get rid of. It is very difficult for them to get rid of their ether image. The image he has formed of himself clings to him, is firmly connected to him.

The attitude of the Russian national soul towards the individual is quite different. This Russian national soul does not have to repeat any of the post-Atlantic cultures in the same way as the French nation; it is a youthful national soul that leaves few imprints on the etheric body. Therefore, when the individual belonging to this Russian national soul immerses himself in his physical body, little of significance happens to him. Consequently, when he enters the spiritual world, he takes little of significance with him, few ethereally woven images of the imagination.

Thus, the souls differ in relation to their national souls after death. On the one hand, we have the host of those individual souls who have passed through death, who carry into the spiritual world sharply woven images of their own being, and on the other hand, in the east, we see young souls ascending, belonging to a young national soul, bringing little in the way of sharply woven human images flooding in the etheric body.

Now, as I have often discussed, we are on the threshold of the great event of the coming time: the appearance of the Christ in a very special way. I do not need to discuss this today. But since the last third of the nineteenth century, He has been preceded by the spirit whom we call the spirit of Michael, the champion of the spirit of the sun, in his struggle to prepare humanity for the Christ event. Now everything depends on the spiritual world preparing for this event, which is to befall humanity spiritually, in an appropriate way. But this can only happen if work is done in the spiritual world, as it were, on the pure development of the Christ, who will appear in the etheric in the future, since he is to appear to man as an etheric form. But for this it is necessary that he who marches before the spirit of the sun, that Michael, fights a battle in the spiritual world. For this battle he needs the help of the souls who, through their bodies, have just been drawn up into the spiritual world, of those souls who bring little of sharply defined imaginative images with them into the spiritual world. And so we see the spirit Michael and in his wake a number of Russian souls fighting for the purity of the spiritual horizon and in a hard struggle with the souls that have come from the West, which bring sharply defined images of fantasy. These must be dispersed and dissolved. We have been seeing this battle between East and West in the making since the last third of the nineteenth century. It is a fierce battle that is to serve the progress of humanity and which consists in the spiritual struggle of European East against European West, in spiritual Russia waging a fierce spiritual battle against spiritual France. This, my dear friends, is one of the most harrowing events of the present time: to see how, to the same extent that the physical alliance between West and East is being carried out down here in the field of great deception, the sharp struggle of the European East, Russia, against the European West, France, is taking place up there in the spiritual world. We have here one of those cases that have such a shattering effect on the spiritual researcher, where one can see how what is behind the veil of the outer sense world is often the opposite of what happens down here in the realm of deception. But I would always and always admonish not to believe that one can determine such things through speculation. Anyone who, from what I have said in individual cases – that the spiritual presents itself as the opposite of what occurs in the realm of the great Maja – might conclude that it must always go to the opposite when it comes from the physical to the spiritual, would be very much mistaken. For there are cases in the spiritual world in which things take place exactly as they do in the physical. Between this case and the other, where they take place in such stark contrast as in relation to the alliance between France and Russia in the physical and spiritual, there are all possible gradations.

Today, we still have little sense of the impulses through which real spiritual science must communicate. I would say that our time has become, in a sense, careless, especially with regard to what appears to be worth communicating to the individual person; for very little is asked about the responsibility that lies behind what is to be communicated for the one who has to consider the connection between the spiritual and physical worlds. Perhaps I may say something to you, not for personal reasons, but only to illustrate, in connection with my lecture the day before yesterday. You see, in this public lecture, where of course I can only speak externally, exoterically, I do not speak as exoterically as one might think, and I would be glad if, especially in such lectures, one would take into consideration the cultural task that spiritual science has. In particular, the fact that spiritual science is behind it is expressed in the way in which what needs to be said is emphasized and said. It is not a matter of arbitrary ideas or something that has been cobbled together. Take this one example: I said that if one wants to assess the circumstances of the individual European nations in this war, one should proceed historically, that one should consider, for example, that Austria received that mission in the Balkans at the request of British politicians, and that basically everything that has happened to Austria is a consequence of what was imposed on it at the behest of Britain. And I said that this must be taken into account, that it must be taken into account that as a result Austria, and with it Germany, came into particular antagonism with Russia, and that England has abandoned its own work and is now fighting against Germany, while the Central Powers and Russia have come into antagonism because Austria, at England's behest, was entrusted with the Balkan mission and also, by coming to the aid of the Turks, was supposed to hold back the influence of the Russian East. Of course, in an exoteric lecture intended for a general audience, one can only hint at what might affect the perceptions that should be stimulated today. But what is behind this event? Outwardly, exoterically, we see English politics on the side of Russian politics, which has come to its consequences precisely through an act of England. We see that outwardly. The spiritual researcher who looks at things in the spiritual world can make a very peculiar discovery today, a most remarkable discovery. Let us assume that the spiritual researcher would look from bottom to top by taking a certain perspective point. He would take the perspective point below the physical plane and look up to the astral plane. He could also take it above the astral plane. Then he would see what is happening on the physical plane and, as it were, also what is happening on the astral plane. It would merge. It is not true that if one looks up from below or down from above through the astral plane, one sees through the astral to the physical and vice versa. If one now looks at the physical plane, it is true that England is fighting against Turkey since Turkey declared war on Russia. But that is mere Maya, for in reality the astral being of England is fighting with Turkey against Russia. So that one has the spectacle of England fighting for Russia in the northwest and for Turkey in the southeast, thus against Russia. Only one thing is decisive for the physical plane and the other for the astral plane.

When one is confronted with such knowledge of the world, one feels that one cannot, of course, communicate this knowledge to the public, but it does urge one to emphasize this one point about England's inconsistency in the East. The fact that this one point is emphasized arises from the recognition of the spiritual connections. This is how I would like to point out the responsibility that one simply has when compiling the individual truths and the way in which one presents them.

If one feels one's occult responsibility, then one does not pick and choose at random, as today's book-makers or journalists do, but one must extract what is to be said from the essence of the current situation. It is not to say something personal, but to draw your attention to the fact that spiritual science, when it steps forward before the world with full responsibility, should really be taken very seriously and should not be confused with all that is spreading today as journalism and book-making and which, in the way it is combined, is very far removed from such a sense of responsibility towards the spiritual powers of the time. I would like to draw your attention, my dear friends, to the seriousness of spiritual science, especially in our time. For our time shows us a serious face in many respects, a very serious face, and only those who understand the seriousness of this face will be able to cope with this time.

To substantiate this, I would also like to bring before you a context that is of interest to the student of spiritual science. It has been said many times that spiritual science truly does not enter the present because it arises from the arbitrariness of one person or another, or because one person or another has made it his ideal out of his own inclination and would like to bring it to other people, but because now is the epoch when the spiritual beings, which otherwise kept the gate of this truth to be revealed to mankind closed, have opened it so that this wisdom flows down into the human soul. And we are approaching a time when people will have to absorb more and more wisdom, which is appropriated by the soul not only in abstract concepts, not only in gray ideas of the mind. We are living towards times when what we call imagination wants to enter into human souls, into human minds. One would like to say, when one sees through the matter: There they hang, like dense clouds hanging over the landscape before a storm, there they hang in the spiritual world and want to enter human minds, and wait until these human minds are ripe. Yes, that is the time; that is how it is.

Now there is a peculiar law: that which is imaginative, which wants to enter into human minds and cannot yet be received as imagination in any age, casts something like a mirage-like image just as far down below the physical plane as it itself is above the physical plane. The imaginations evoke passions in human beings, feelings, urges, instincts, which express themselves in antagonism. And if we take today the instincts, the outbursts of passion with which the nations insult each other, they are nothing other than the result of imaginations that should be taken up by the European nations but cannot be taken down, for they are reflected in the subconscious of human beings in such instincts and passions that contradict the truth. Basically, we can say that all the discharge of instincts and passions that we are experiencing in the present is an expression of the fact that renewed imaginations want to break into the world of human cultural development. All the often so sad phenomena that the war brings to the surface are the transformed imaginations that humanity cannot grasp.

Again, and this never seems unimportant to me, I would like to point out that one should not say: So every war is transformed imagination. Wars can also be something completely different. Today's war is what I have said. Generalization, which is important for understanding the physical plane, is not important for the spiritual world. Here, things must be investigated individually.

Today we see – and I would now like to present an appearance from a certain perspective for you to consider and also explain – today we see how members of different nations persecute each other in hatred and how they insult each other. Where does this come from? Now, since we have already taken on board in all seriousness the essence of repeated earthly lives, it does not seem particularly incomprehensible to us that the soul passes through different nationalities in its repeated lives. Someone who is incarnated today in a German body may already be preparing in his innermost being to undergo the next incarnation in an English body; someone who is incarnated today in an English body may already be preparing to undergo the next incarnation in a German body. Man is already this dual being, this duality. Outwardly, we stand before the world – not only in relation to the external physical-sensual view, but in relation to many other things – quite legitimately linked to the nature and weaving of the national soul through our physical body; but within, something is already asserting itself that will be quite different for the next incarnation. Now, of all the many things man is hostile towards, he is often most hostile towards his own innermost being. He fights against that the most. He does not know that it is his innermost being. Take an Englishman, who is predestined by the innermost part of his soul to be a German in his next incarnation. There we see him today, fighting against his own inner being. He fights against the next German incarnation. This comes to expression today in the fact that he rails shamefully against everything German. Because he sees the goal in the German body, he rages against what, in the spiritual world, is his innermost being. It is basically a conflict of the soul with itself, and only externally, in the Maja, is it the case that over there, beyond the Channel, people here in Central Europe are being ranted against. Basically, what is being ranted about refers to one's own soul. This shows the deep tragedy that must overcome people in their whole being and in their innermost impulses when, where the matter becomes bitterly serious, they compare the outer Maja with what is within.

And so we can see the souls of nations as real living entities that permeate and pervade the individual closed individuals. And what the individual experiences, he experiences in connection with his national soul. On the physical plane, in the outer life, people face each other today. One nation blames the other for the war and believes it is saying something special. But what about this blaming of guilt? The karma of each nation and the karma of the nation in question are, of course, connected with what the soul of the nation is experiencing in the people and directing into the individual etheric bodies and thus also into the astral bodies. Thus the individual nations live side by side and with one another in relationships that are an expression of the relationship between their national soul and the karma of the national soul. And when one nation experiences this or that through another, when this or that happens to one nation through another, it does not happen without it being connected with the innermost karma. Insofar as the national soul is a closed entity, there is also a national karma. And while in the outer exoteric one believes that one nation does this or that to another, it is the case that each nation experiences its own individual national karma in what it experiences. When one of them inflicts a defeat on the other, something takes place in the defeated nation that it has inflicted on itself through its own karma. And when one speaks in the very rough manner, as is outwardly justified, of the right of one and the other, it is really no different than when an old man sees a small child beside him, fresh and growing into youthful vigor, and he says, “Why am I getting older, why does decay show itself more and more to me? I see: the child takes away my strength; as it grows older, the child takes away my strength. While he is losing his strength in a perfectly natural way, he can succumb to the delusion – he will not do it, but I have heard of such things – that the child is taking his strength from him. You can see right away that this is nonsense, because the causal connection lies in every single being. But it is the same with the karma of nations. Nations live side by side, and when one conquers the other, the victory is due to its karma; even if with the same victory the other nation must succumb, the defeat is caused by the karma of the other nation. Thus spiritual science really does bring peace to the soul, even if on the other hand it also realizes that the forces acting against each other must indeed act against each other.

It is precisely through such things that one would like to point out today that spiritual science does not want to be just a game with sensational concepts, but that spiritual science, when viewed in its bitter seriousness, really shakes and shakes our soul and makes a different being out of man when he takes it seriously. We must only take a good look at this, really take a good look at how superficially it is sometimes taken as a mere intellectual game, and how it should actually be taken as something that can truly make a completely different being out of a person. And much will come of engaging in such things, much of understanding the connections will come about.

When two people have different views about something that is happening in front of them, one of them will usually be wrong. It will be easy to prove that one of them is wrong. But the individual life of a human being is different from the life of nations. We must not identify the life of nations with that of individual human beings, nor must we believe that the deeds of nations can be subject to the same impulses of judgment as the lives of individual human beings. Otherwise, one judges in a way that one would never judge if one had a blue horizon about the relations between nations, as is the case, for example, when one says that one must declare war on Germany because it has violated Belgium's neutrality – as has been said – one must declare war on moral grounds. In politics, it is simply nonsensical to apply the same categories that are rightly applied in judging individuals. Because it is quite natural that Germany's interest requires it to advance on Belgium, and England's interest requires it to prevent that. At the moment you sincerely admit that the interest is there and there, you have something that indicates that there are contrasting interests. When two people claim something contrary, it will be necessary to prove that one of them is wrong. When two nations have to do something contrary, then they must do it. And to believe that the judgment of one side can sweep away that of the other is just as foolish as if someone were to say: You drew me a tree that has a branch here, one there, one there; that is quite wrong, the tree looks like that. And now he draws it so that the branch is here and the other one is there and so on. One person has drawn it from one side and the other from the other. Of course, you can put that together. But what is happening in world history cannot be balanced out by mere observation. When the souls of nations, with their different mindsets, have to do things through their people, it is impossible to somehow decide by judgments like: one is right and the other is wrong. There are contrasting interests that must necessarily be discharged in phenomena such as today's. You cannot refute what is said on one side or the other. Just as one must not believe that the karma of one does not stand independently beside that of the other, so one must not believe that one can refute the judgment of the other with the judgment of the one. For the one nation may have interests which it would be a breach of duty for the statesman of the other nation to oppose, while it is the duty of the statesman of the first nation to stand up for these interests.

Judgments of people, judgments in the consciousness that we have on the physical plane within our physical bodies, only come into consideration in the field of the mind and balance each other dialectically, with one knocking the other out of the field. The consciousnesses of the folk-souls judge differently. They also have judgments that differ from each other, but these judgments are not merely judgments of the mind, they are facts. When one judgment defeats the other in the human sphere, then it does not hurt, then one kills, but one does not see it as a death. But it is different when what prevails in the consciousness of the souls of nations, and what is not just an abstract judgment, but what works as facts, when that collides. Then one must recognize the necessity, the iron necessity, that it has come to this. And then one must have the possibility of adopting, so to speak, a form of judgment in one's mind, a form of spirit that does not agree with the form of spirit that one encounters in everyday life.

One must think, as it were, with the folk souls, not with the individual human souls. If one thinks with the individual human souls, then it is quite natural that one tries not to make a judgment that contradicts that of the other, because then one would not be able to live socially in the human world. If you have to think and feel with the soul of the people, then there will come times when it is impossible to relate to it in any other way than by identifying with it and considering its content to be justified, without stepping out of this people's soul, without comparing what it has to do with what the others have to do. Because that is the business of the others, it cannot be brought together in a common consciousness, it goes from consciousness to consciousness. From this point of view, you will understand that one can ask: What does the German people have to say about its mission, considering that it considers itself to be the descendant of Fichte, Schiller and the other greats? It has to say that what it is undertaking today is the outward expression of its spiritual mission and that it cannot fail to fulfill it. Those who are part of the people must feel with all their being that it must happen. And there is no possibility that anyone, when one sharply defines what must happen for the German people, could call this an attack. The attack, the assault on the other people only begins when one starts to curse about the other people. These are things that must be understood very deeply today: to stand up positively for the essence of a people basically means no more than what can be compared to the fact that one can only take care of one's own body, that it is in order, and not in the same way for another body.

Please note that this is a decisive factor for the judgment that we can gain from the sources of spiritual research.

And when we look into the weaving and nature of the folk souls and what is behind them, behind what is happening on the outside, I would like to say that for the spiritual researcher, especially today, the matter is becoming very, very serious, extraordinarily serious. But this seriousness is also fitting for our time, and it is as if the fact that we have seen the greatest military conflicts were connected with the great demand of the time to found a culture that takes into account what lies behind the veil of sense perception. And those who have the right sense will judge precisely what is taking place in the outer world today, who see in the outer events something like signs, like mighty world symbols for the dawning of something completely new in the evolution of mankind.

I said: Not only does the intellect and its prejudices rebel in man against what spiritual science has to say about the supersensible entity behind the external things, but the mind, the impulses of the will, rebel. They do not want it because the soul must change its way of thinking and feel and perceive differently about many things. — That I said. Yes, that is also a truth. You see, we not only sleep at night, we also sleep during the day, only that at night our attraction to the physical body is so strong that it permeates our astral body and our ego like a fog and dulls our consciousness. When we now descend with the same astral body and the same ego into our physical body to satisfy our desires, then what we develop as consciousness is permeated by the influences of the national soul and there again consciousness is interspersed, so that down there, despite our belief that we are quite awake, there is always something asleep in us. Basically, something is always asleep in us, and that in itself is a sleep within us, just as the folk soul works within us, because it does not happen with the same consciousness with which we make our day-waking judgments. And to this, to the sleep of the day, which is only covered by ordinary consciousness, to this also belongs the working over of the folk souls of the other nations. They also have an effect in a certain way on the sleeping human mind and produce different phenomena than during sleep, but they do produce phenomena on the physical plane.

For example, while the German people had an evolutionary theory through Goethe that came from the very depths of the German being itself, they left it unnoticed and accepted Darwinism. Just as the Italian people have to develop the sentient soul, the French the intellectual soul, and the English the consciousness soul, so the German has to develop the I, and much about the nature of the German people becomes understandable when one feels and realizes how everything that is German culture wells up from the I. This connection between the ego and the most sacred spiritual goods is a characteristic of the Central European people.

It is particularly evident in one phenomenon. If we take the occult truths themselves and look towards the West: external culture has little connection with what appears as mysticism, as occultism. There are actually always two parallel currents. It is not easy to find anything in an ordinary bookshop in Paris that is connected with occultism; you have to go to other places that present it. Now we see how it is in the German to bring everything out of the ego, how the German has Jakob Böhme, how German cultural development is unthinkable without this occult influence. Think of Goethe and Lessing. There are not two currents flowing side by side, but there is one stream, there is real life interwoven and permeated with the spiritual, and one cannot approach this with a materialistic view, as is propagated by the “Star of the East”, that Christ is still incarnating in a physical human being. Hence the necessity arose, as did the antagonism between Germany and England, which could not be allowed to wait until war brought it about: to clearly separate what German occultism is from what English occultism is. And perhaps one or other of them will now reflect on why this split has become necessary. But I only wanted to give a hint. Because some people may see a kind of archetype in the compilation of facts, the justification of facts, when they look at the letters from Grey and Annie Besant today: the way of proving, of putting things together, is very similar in both. But I only wanted to point out how what emerges from the German people is connected to the innermost soul. When the German is awake, he adheres, for example, to the profound theory of development of Goethe, who presented the sequence of organisms but took the impulse for the arrangement from the deepest interior of the I. I say this as a fact, without sympathy or antipathy. Half a century later, Darwin reproduced it from the consciousness soul, but with a materialistic slant. The world understood it more easily, and the German world also preferred to accept the theory of evolution in a Darwinian rather than a Goethean form. Goethe even founded a color theory out of the depths of the German being; the physicists still regard it as nonsense today, because the outer world has adopted Newton's color theory. When will the Darwinian and Newtonian theory be taken instead of Goethe's theory of development and color? Then, when within the German people, people are asleep and the other soul of the people can have an effect. There we have this sleeping in the midst of waking. And when the people are shaken up, they still fail to recognize the matter, then they realize: something is not right —, then they go and take their box in which they have the medals received from England. They send them back and just forget to send back the English coloring of the theory of evolution or the Newtonian coloring of the theory of colors. In particular, one could prescribe the example of a certain coloration of Haeckelianism as a good recipe. One experiences many things there. For example, one could still experience it in these days; one could hear that in a special scientific society in German cities a lecture was given about what has been disturbed in the international nature of the peoples by this war, and how attention was drawn to something that is true if you apply larger scales, but not if you apply those that this gentleman with his ordinary professorial mind applies. If you start from these standards, it sounds very strange when this gentleman says: Internationalism must reappear as soon as the war is over, because otherwise the German would lose a lot, and it would in turn, a special metaphysics would awaken that the German had previously unfolded, while he is glad that this German spirit, with its inclination towards the supernatural, has been flooded by the nations, who have little inclination towards the supernatural. — One could experience this in these days in a special economic lecture: the fear of the awakening of the German essence.

Much could be said, but I wanted to express just a few thoughts about what can be gained by taking seriously, bitterly but blissfully, an external view of life, which flows like a magic breath through us when we take spiritual science in its full depth. To consider, feel and sense this is our task in our time, and with such feelings we may survey this time and feel united with those who are standing outside and who have to stand up for what karma demands with their blood and their souls.

Thus we summarize what our knowledge and our task should be and what should inspire confidence in the words:

From the courage of the fighters,
From the blood of the battles,
From the suffering of the abandoned,
From the people's sacrificial deeds
The fruit of the spirit comes to life —
Guiding souls, conscious of the spirit
Into the realm of the spirit.